


On the Outside, Looking In

by Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-03-19
Updated: 2009-03-19
Packaged: 2018-09-20 05:55:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9478535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/pseuds/Sandrine%20Shaw
Summary: A brief glimpse at normalcy. Or whatever passes for it.





	

In the quiet nights, when she's alone in a too large apartment and her childhood memories keep her awake (the happy, nostalgic ones, as well as... the others, the ones that choke her up in her sleep and leave her waking up with her lungs burning up from the inside as she gasps for air), Samantha sits down on the windowsill with a cup of hot chocolate and watches the people outside. Night owls. Whores and drug dealers on their way to meet their clients, homeless people looking for a warm spot to spend the night, actors and businessmen coming home late after a day's work. They walk briskly through the night, casting long black shadows on the sidewalk under the neon light of the street lamps.

From up in the sixth floor, in the dark, they all look vaguely the same, and she enjoys playing a private little game, coming up with stories who they are and where they're coming from. Where they're headed to. 

She sips her chocolate, sweet and rich on her tongue with just a hint of bitterness lingering, and imagines what it must be like for them: ordinary people with no purpose in their lives other than to exist and no clue that there's an expiry date for all of this and that it's approaching fast. She envies them for their ignorance and their silly little lives, and she wonders if this is what normalcy feels like: a hot drink, and a mild curiosity for the lives of strangers.

More often than not, the chocolate gets cold, though. There's always an emergency of some kind. Someone to kill or someone's life to save, fighting a future that's already set in stone. A secret meeting with an informant, stealing a vaccine from a high-security lap, reports of U.F.O. sightings to be investigated. Or just Alex, stumbling through her door with a gun shot wound and leaving crimson stains on the grey carpet floor that never quite seem to wash out properly.

The notion of normalcy passes in a flash, gone too fast for her to really grasp it, much less hold on to it. She tells herself it's better this way, that she'd get bored before long if her life was anything like those people's. She tells herself that she's nothing like them, nor does she wish to be.

She doesn't like chocolate all that much anyway.

End


End file.
